At the Edge of the Sun (Maggie Bennett 3)

“Ask me again if Bud was lying.”

“You knew he was alive, didn’t you?” She fastened on a more interesting topic. “You never thought he was dead.”

“I didn’t know. I’d heard enough rumors that there was a strong element of doubt, but no one was talking. The name Lazarus was just too damned coincidental.”

“He is dead now, isn’t he?”

Randall cast her a brief look. “He’s dead.”

“Good,” she said, leaning back in the seat and shielding her eyes against the glare of the rising sun.

“So ask me.”

“Ask you what?”

“Whether I hired him to kill Pulaski.”

Maggie sighed. “I thought we’d settled that long ago.”

“We didn’t.”

“Okay, Randall, I’ll humor you. Did you hire Bud Willis to kill my husband?”

“Yes.”

Her heart stopped, slamming to a halt that was physically painful, before it started a slow, heavy jerking. “Explain.” Her voice was as raw as Mack’s had been.

“Two years ago I ran into Mike Jackson at a restaurant in Washington, and like a fool, I asked about you. He just happened to have a picture of you and Pulaski in your house in Maine. The two of you looked so goddamned happy. I said all the right things, and that night I went out and got drunker than I’ve ever been, before or after.”

“And?” Her voice was cold and still.

“And I ran into Bud Willis. Or Bud Willis came looking for me. It doesn’t really matter which. And we proceeded to drink together, and get even drunker. And at one point during the evening he asked me how much it would be worth to me to have Pulaski iced. And I told him money was no object.”

“You didn’t mean it.”

“I was too drunk to know what I meant. Bud just said fine and ordered another round. Three days later Pulaski was dead and Bud sent me a bill for twenty thousand dollars.”

“Did you pay it?” Everything hinged on his answer. Her whole life hinged on it; his too. If he said the wrong thing she would take the gun from her waistband and shoot out the instrument panel on the plane. And that would be the end of it. “Did you?”

His bleak, despairing gaze was everything she could have hoped for. “I went out and found Bud. I broke his arm, three ribs, and wrist. I would have killed him if someone hadn’t pulled me off him.”

Maggie leaned back, shutting her eyes as relief swept over her. Relief that was so sweet she felt dizzy with it, relief and love that threatened to burst within her. The final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place, and it was the only possible answer she could have accepted. He’d been as great of victim of Bud Willis’s madness and evil as she had.

“So you can see it’s hopeless,” Randall continued, his eyes trained on the dawnlit horizon. “There’s no way you could live with someone responsible for Pulaski’s death.”

“That’s true,” she said evenly. “So it’s a good thing I’m not planning to live with Lazarus.”

He cast a brief, startled glance in her direction, but her expression was bland, giving nothing away.

“We can probably make it as far as Cairo,” he continued. “You can make connections there.”

“What are you going to do?”

He hesitated. “I have to go back to Lebanon.”

“Why?”

“It’s a need-to-know basis.”